Sunday, December 30, 2012

In several articles and speeches
since at least 2004 (“Trapped in the ruins”, The Guardian, 20 March 2004), and especially in
the commotion provoked by Girish Karnad’s speech in Mumbai (autumn 2012), William
Dalrymple has condemned Nobel prize winner V.S. Naipaul for writing that the
Vijayanagar empire was a Hindu bastion besieged by Muslim states. The famous
writer has taken the ruins of vast Vijayanagar as illustration of how Hinduism
is a “wounded civilization”, viz. wounded by Islam. Dalrymple’s
counter-arguments against this conflictual view of Indian history consist in
bits of Islamic influence in the Vijayanagar kings’ court life, such as Hindu
courtiers wearing Muslim dress, Hindu armies adopting techniques borrowed from
the Muslims, styles of palace architecture and the Persian nomenclature of
political functions; and conversely, elements of Hinduism in Muslims courts and
households, e.g. the Muslim festival of Muharram looking like the Kumbha Mela
of the Hindus.

Secularism and Vijayanagar

As is all too common in
Nehruvian-secularist discourse, Dalrymple’s analysis of the role of Islam in
India stands out by its superficiality. Whenever a Hindu temple or a Muslim festival
is found to employ personnel belonging to the opposite religion, secular
journalists go gaga and report on this victory of syncretism over religious
orthodoxy. Secular historians including Dalrymple do likewise about religious
cross-pollination in the past.

It is true that Hindus are eager
to integrate foreign elements from their surroundings, from Hellenistic
astrology (now mis-termed “Vedic astrology”) in the past to the English
language and American consumerism today. So Hindu courts adopted styles and
terminology from their Muslim counterparts. They even enlisted Muslim
mercenaries in their armies, so “secular” were they. We could say that Hindus
are multicultural at heart, or open-minded. But that quality didn’t get
rewarded, except with a betrayal by their Muslim regiments during the battle of
Talikota (1565): they defected to the enemy, in which they recognized
fellow-Muslims. When the chips were down, Hindu open-mindedness and syncretism
were powerless against their heartfelt belief in Islamic solidarity. In
September 2012, Dalrymple went to Hyderabad to praise the city and its
erstwhile Muslim dynasty as a centre of Hindu-Muslim syncretism; but fact is
that after Partition, the ruler of Hyderabad opted for Pakistan, against
multicultural India. When the chips are down, secular superficiality is no
match for hard-headed orthodoxy.

Muslims too sometimes adopted
Hindu elements. However, it would be unhistorical to assume a symmetry with
what the Hindus did. Hindus really adopted foreign elements, but most Muslims
largely just retained Hindu elements which had always been part of their
culture and which lingered on after conversion. Thus, the Pakistanis held it
against the Bengalis in their artificial Muslim state (1947-71) that their
language was very Sanskritic, not using the Arabic script, and that their
womenfolk “still” wore saris and no veils. The Bengali Muslims did this not
because they had “adopted” elements from Hinduism, but because they had
retained many elements from the Hindu culture of their forefathers. “Pakistan”
means the “land of the pure”, i.e. those who have overcome the taints of
Paganism, the very syncretism which Dalrymple celebrates. Maybe it is in the
fitness of things that a historian should sing paeans to this religious syncretism
for, as far as Islam is concerned, it is a thing of the past.

A second difference between
Hindus and Muslims practicing syncretism is that in the case of Muslims, this
practice was in spite of their religion, due to a hasty (and therefore incomplete)
conversion under duress and a lack of sufficient policing by proper Islamic
authorities. If, as claimed by Dalrymple, a Sultan of Bijapur venerated both
goddess Saraswati and prophet Mohammed, it only proves that he hadn’t interiorized
Mohammed’s strictures against idolatry yet. In more recent times, though, this
condition has largely been remedied. Secular journalists now have to search
hard for cases of Muslims caught doing Hindu things, for such Muslims become
rare. Modern methods of education and social control have wiped out most traces
of Hinduism. Thus, since their independence, the Bengali Muslims have made
great strides in de-hinduizing themselves, as by widely adopting proper Islamic
dress codes. The Tabligh (“propaganda”) movement as well as informal efforts by
clerics everywhere have gone a long way to “islamize the Muslims”, i.e. to
destroy all remnants of Hinduism still lingering among them.

Hindu iconoclasm?

Another unhistorical item in the
secular view of Islam in India is the total absence of an Islamic prehistory
outside India. Yet, all Muslims know about this history to some extent and base
their laws and actions upon it. In particular, they know about Mohammed’s
career in Arabia and seek to replicate it, from wearing “the beard of the Prophet”
to emulating his campaigns against Paganism.

Dalrymple, like all Nehruvians, makes much of the work of the American
Marxist historian Richard Eaton. This man is famous for saying that the Muslims
have indeed destroyed many Hindu temples (thousands, according to his very
incomplete list, though grouped as the oft-quoted “eighty”), but that they
based themselves for this conduct on Hindu precedent. Indeed, he has found a
handful of cases of Hindu conquerors “looting” temples belonging to the defeated
kings, typically abducting the main idol to install it in their own capital.
This implies a very superficial equating between stealing an idol (but leaving
the worship of the god concerned intact, and even continuing it in another
temple) and destroying temples as away
of humiliating and ultimately destroying their religion itself. But we already
said that secularists are superficial. However, he forgets to tell his readers
that he has found no case at all of a Muslim temple-destroyer citing these alleged
Hindu precedents. If they try to justify their conduct, it is by citing
Mohammed’s Arab precedents. The most famous case is the Kaaba in Mecca, where
the Prophet and his nephew Ali destroyed 360 idols with their own hands. What
the Muslims did to Vijayanagar was only an imitation of what the Prophet had
done so many times in Arabia, only on a much larger scale.

From historians like Eaton and Dalrymple, we expect a more international
view of history than what they offer in their account of Islamic destructions
in India. They try to confine their explanations to one country, whereas Islam
is globalist par excellence. By contrast, Naipaul does reckon with
international cultural processes, in particular the impact of Islam among the
converted peoples, not only in South but also in West and Southeast Asia. He
observes that they have been estranged from themselves, alienated from their
roots, and therefore suffering from a neurosis.

So, Naipaul is right and Dalrymple wrong in their respective assessments
of the role of Islam in India. Yet, in one respect, Naipaul is indeed mistaken.
In his books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, he analyses the impact of
Islam among the non-Arab converts, but assumes that for Arabs, Islam is more
natural. True, the Arabs did not have to adopt a foreign language for religious
purposes, they did not have to sacrifice their own national traditions in
name-giving; but otherwise they too had to adopt a religion that wasn’t theirs.
The Arabs were Pagans who worshipped many gods and tolerated many religions
(Jews, Zoroastrians, various Christian Churches) in their midst. Mohammed made
it his life’s work to destroy their multicultural society and replace it with a
homogeneous Islamic one. Not exactly the syncretism which Dalrymple waxes so
eloquent about.

Colonial “Orientalism”?

Did Muslims “contribute” to
Indian culture, as Dalrymple claims? Here too, we should distinguish between
what Islam enjoins and what people who happen to be Muslims do. Thus, he says
that Muslims contributed to Indian music. I am quite illiterate on art history,
but I’ll take his word for it. However, if they did, they did it is spite of
Islam, and not because of it. Mohammed closed his ears not to hear the music,
and orthodox rulers like Aurangzeb and Ayatollah Khomeini issued measures
against it. Likewise, the Moghul school of painting shows that human beings are
inexorably fond of visual art, but does not disprove that Islam frowns on it.

Also, while some tourists fall for the Taj Mahal, which Naipaul so
dislikes, the Indo-Saracenic architecture extant does not nullify the
destruction of many more beautiful buildings which could have attracted far
more tourists. In what sense is it a “contribution” anyway? Rather than filling
a void, it is at best a replacement of existing Hindu architecture with new
Muslim architecture. Similarly, if no Muslim music (or rather, music by Muslims)
had entered India, then native Hindu music would have flourished more, and who
is Dalrymple to say that Hindu music is inferior?

Another discursive strategy of the secularists, applied here by
Dalrymple, is to blame the colonial view of history. Naipaul is said to be
inspired by colonial Orientalists and to merely repeat their findings. This
plays on the strong anti-Westernism among Indians. But it is factually
incorrect: Naipaul cites earlier sources (e.g. Dalrymple omits Ibn Battuta, the
Moroccan traveler who only described witnessed Sultanate cruelty to the Hindus
with his own eyes) as well as the findings of contemporaneous archaeologists.
Moreover, even the colonial historians only repeat what older native sources
tell them. The destruction of Vijayanagar is a historical fact and an event
that took place with no colonizers around. Unless you mean the Muslim rulers.

Negationism

In the West, we are familiar with the
phenomenon of Holocaust negationism. While most people firmly disbelieve the
negationists, some will at least appreciate their character: they are making a
lot of financial, social and professional sacrifices for their beliefs. The
ostracism they suffer is fierce. Even those who are skeptical of their position
agree that negationists at least have the courage of their conviction.

In India, and increasingly also in the West and
in international institutions, we are faced with a similar phenomenon, viz.
Jihad negationism. This is the denial of aggression and atrocities motivated by
Islam. Among the differences, we note those in social position of the deniers
and those in the contents of the denial. Jihad deniers are not marginals who
have sacrificed a career to their convictions, on the contrary; they serve
their careers greatly by uttering the politically palatable “truth”. In India,
any zero can become a celebrity overnight by publishing a condemnation of the
“communalists” and taking a stand for Jihad denial and history distortion. The
universities are full of them, while people who stand by genuine history are
kept out. Like Jawaharlal Nehru, most of these negationists hold forth on the
higher humbug (as historian Paul Johnson observed) and declare themselves
“secular”.

Whereas the Holocaust lasted only four years
and took place in war circumstances and largely in secret (historians are still
troubled over the absence of an order by Adolf Hitler for the Holocaust, a fact
which gives a handle to the deniers), Jihad started during the life of Mohammed
and continues till today, entirely openly, proudly testified by the
perpetrators themselves. From the biography and the biographical collections of
the Prophet (Sira, Ahadith) through medieval chronicles and
travel diaries down to the farewell letters or videos left by hundreds of
suicide terrorists today, there are literally thousands of sources by Muslims
attesting that Islam made them do it. But whereas I take Muslims seriously and
believe them at their word when they explain their motivation, some people
overrule this manifold testimony and decide that the Muslims concerned meant
something else.

The most favoured explanation is that British
colonialism and now American imperialism inflicted poverty on them and this
made them do it, though they clothed it in Islamic discourse. You see, the
billionaire Osama bin Laden, whose family has a long-standing friendship with
the Bush family, was so poor that he saw no option but to hijack some airplanes
and fly them into the World Trade Center. What else was he to do? And Mohammed,
way back in the 7th century, already the ruler of Medina and much of
the Arabian peninsula, just had to have his critics murdered or, as soon as he
could afford it, formally executed. He had to take hostages and permit his men
to rape them; nay, he just had to force the Jewish woman Rayhana into
concubinage after murdering her relatives. If you don’t like what he did, blame
Britain and America. Their colonialism and imperialism made him do it! Under
the colonial dispensation which didn’t exist yet, he Muslim troops who were
paid by the Vijayanagar emperor had no other option but to betray their
employer and side with his opponents who, just by coincidence, happened to be
Muslim as well. And if you don’t believe this, the secularists will come up
with another story.

Conclusion

India is experiencing a regime of history
denial. In this sense, the West is more and more becoming like India. There are
some old professors of Islam or religion (and I know a few) who hold the
historical view, viz. that Mohammed (if he existed at all) was mentally
afflicted, that Islam consists of a manifold folie à deux (“madness with two”, where a wife supports and
increasingly shares her husband’s self-delusion), and that it always was a
political religion which spread by destroying other religions. But among the
younger professors, it is hard to find any who are so forthright. There is a
demand for reassurance about Islam, and universities only recruit personnel who
provide that. Indeed, many teach false history in good faith, thinking that
untruth about the past in this case is defensible because it fosters better
interreligious relations in the present. Some even believe their own stories,
just like the layman who is meant to lap them up. Such is also my impression of
William Dalrymple.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

At long last, I have read Prof. Daya Krishna’s
book Indian Philosophy. A Counter
Perspective (OUP, Delhi 1996 (1991)). When the book first came out, I had
just resolved that the contemporary history of India’s communal situation was
more an urgent need than the abstruse philosophies which I had come to Varanasi
to study. Also, I was convinced that young people have little to say in
philosophy, that first you have to prove yourself in more mundane pursuits, of
which one had forced itself upon me. In subsequent years, I did read some books
on Indian philosophy, including Daya Krishna’s own edited volume Discussion and Debate in Indian Philosophy
(2004), but I didn’t follow the subject closely.

And when at last I was drawn to reading this
book when it was presented to me, it was still not because by now I had come to
value philosophy once more, but because Daya Krishna (1924-2007) had been a member
of the Changers’ Club, the debating circle of friends at Delhi University,
featuring the later journalist Girilal Jain, economists Ram Swarup and Raj
Krishna and historian Sita Ram Goel. To my knowledge, just one member is still
alive, and with her I only talked briefly in 2009. Daya Krishna died just when
I had made up my mind to interview him about the Changers’ Club and later
developments, so that didn’t work out. But I trust that up there, he is taking
it philosophically.

In some chapters, Daya Krishna seems to talk as
if he takes for granted that the Vedas are apaurusheya,
“impersonal”, i.e. of supernatural origin, but in Indian Philosophy he musters arguments why the Vedas are just human
literature. Thus, the existence of different versions of the Yajurveda was
consciously countenanced by the Yajurvedic rishis: “Obviously, they would not
have regarded it as apaurusheya or revealed” (p.84). Repetition of Vedic
verses is another key to the natural process of intertextuality: ”It is not
only that a very large number of Mantras from the Rgveda are repeated in the
other Vedas, but that there are substantial repetitions in the Rgveda itself.”
(p.86)

The rishis
freely borrowed from each other, they could see far because they stood on the
shoulders of giants: “But if this was the relation of one Vedic rsi to another, how can that
relation be understood either in terms of apaurusheyatva
or revelation, or even in terms of Vedic authority?” (p.86) Answer: it cannot,
i.e. it should not be understood as a divine revelation like what is claimed
for the Ten Commandments or the Quran. It must be seen as just a
collection of hymns to (not from) the
gods by human poets. We know their names, their genealogies (with one of them
the brother or the grandfather of another), their whereabouts, roughly also
their chronology, so we are very much dealing with a human composition.

In traditionalist circles it
would be sacrilege to say this, but: “In fact, the very large proliferation of
the shakhas [‘branches’, channels of
transmission], at least as mentioned in the tradition, testifies to the fact
that the Rishis of those days treated their Vedic patrimony with a degree of
freedom that seems sacrilegious when viewed in the perspective of attitudes
with which the Vedas have been traditionally looked at for a long time. (…) the
Vedas were regarded in a totally different way in Vedic times.” (p.84) So, next
time I say this, I can quote a Indian authority for it, and that will hopefully
silence those who see Western conspiracies against Hinduism everywhere.

Enthusiasm oozes out when
hedescribes the ancient Hindu
philosophies. Today’s devout God-fearing Hindus, temple-goers and practitioners
of a daily puja, would not feel at
home with the old-school Hindu philosophers, many of whom were functionally or
even explicitly atheist. Daya Krishna cites Karl Potter with approval: “If, for
example, one chooses the second century AD, one would discover that ‘the major
systems extant at that time – Samkhya, Mimansa, Nyaya and Vaisesika, Jainism,
the several schools of Buddhism, and Carvaka – are none of them theistic’. But
‘if one slices instead at, say, the fourteenth century AD, one finds that
Nyaya-Vaisesika has become pronouncedly theistic, that Buddhism and Carvaka had
disappeared, and that several varieties of theistic Vedanta have come into
prominence.’” (p.40) I guess that proves God punishes those who don’t believe
in Him with disappearance. But it also shows in passing that medieval and
modern Hindus are very different from their ancient ancestors, including the rishis
they swear by.

Daya Krishna questions two common assumptions,
viz. that Indian philosophy is “spiritual”, and that it is chiefly concerned
with moksha, “liberation”. Of course
much philosophizing was technical and not concerned with meditation and
liberation. For instance, Nyaya philosophy has a lot to say on what
philosophers call epistemology, i.e. the ways of knowing, but it has less to offer to those who are eager for
liberation. The philosopher quotes a list of mundane works (p.33-34), including
treatises on painting and on eroticism, that start out with a promise that the
knowledge provided here will lead to moksha.
This was just a convention, a work that wanted to draw attention to itself just
had to announce itself as a way to liberation; and the reader should use his
own discrimination to decide which books really deal with liberation.

The difference between Indian schools of
philosophy lies not in their respective conceptions of moksha. They quarrel about metaphysical or epistemological issues,
about how many fundamental building blocks the cosmos has, or about the status
of the Vedas – but rarely about the need for, and even less about the way to
liberation. Moksha was taken for
granted, at least in the age that concerns us here, after the introduction of
alphabetic writing in India ca. 300 BC. The way towards liberation was
generically called yoga, and its modus operandi was left to teachers in
confidential settings.

Coming to the Upanishads, it is their
classification that arouses unorthodox suspicions. According to Daya Krishna:
“Most are not independent works, but selections made out of a pre-existing
text”. (p.104), which raises questions, such as: who made the selection, and
why? Thus, the Aitareya Upanishad forms the middle part of the Aitareya
Aranyaka, the Kena forms the 10th chapter of the Jaiminiya
Upanishad-Brahmana, the Taittiriya is the 7th to 9th
chapter of Taittiriya Aranyaka, while the Katha is part of the Taittiriya Brahmana.

Daya Krishna wisely avoids pronouncing on the
difficult question of their absolute chronology, but he observes that in
relative order, Upanishad is a genre stretching from the old Upanishads which
are embedded in Vedic literature, through the middle ones to a host of late
ones as recent as the Muslim period. Again, the fact that many clearly postdate
the Vedic period (even by the large definition of “Vedic” current in India)
casts doubt on their status of apaurusheyatva.
Here too, we know the situation and the story of Yajnavalkya, Satyakama Jabala,
Uddalaka Aruni and others seers, as of any human writers.

Briefly, Daya Krishna was a Hindu philosopher
who knew his classics very well, and who took a questioning position. He was
not a secularist, the kind who know next to nothing of their tradition yet
condemn it out of hand anyway. But he was not a believer either, aware as he
was of the contradiction between the common beliefs about Vedic literature and
what the Vedas themselves say.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Recently an e-mail exchange took place between my
friend K. Venkat and the retired “eminent historian” Prof. Harbans Mukhia. Venkat
himself gave a fitting reply to the august scholar’s opinions, which is
circulating on the net (I received a copy on 9 Dec. 2012). Herewith I want to
formulate my own comment.

Prof. Mukhia replied to a critical query about
Islamic history in India: “If you derive all your knowledge of
medieval Indian history from ‘historians’ like Sita Ram Goel and Koenraad Elst
and so forth, this is the shoddy history you will land up with. Sita Ram Goel
was a publisher and seller of RSS books and his knowledge of history was
confined to what he had learnt in the RSS shakhas. And the Belgian Elst is an
hony. member of the VHP and knows no Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, any Indian
language, much less Persian, so essential for getting to know medieval Indian
history. And since Persian is not taught in the shakhas, Goel had no inkling of
it either.”

Let
us first set the language allegation straight before addressing the historical
and political issues. Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003) had Hindi as mother tongue, a
language in which he published several historical novels that were praised
precisely for their pure and imaginative language. He went to an Urdu-medium
school where Persian was part of the curriculum. He graduated from Delhi
University where he studied History through the medium of English, a language
in which he published many books. After his studies he lived in Bengal for a
decade and became fluent in Bengali. He also read the Mahabharata and other
Hindu classics in the original Sanskrit. As for myself, since Harbans Mukhia is
unimpressed by real-life experience, let me just point to the testimony of my
diplomas: I studied Hindi, Sanskrit and Persian, apart from Chinese and a
number of European languages. After health problems starting in 2000, I haven’t
been to India much, so my colloquial Hindi has become distinctly rusty; but I
can still consult writings in that language. I also learned a smattering of
classical Tamil a few years ago as well as biblical Hebrew and modern Arabic in
my student days, now all but forgotten but I still know the grammar and some
religious terminology. In all more than enough to do history.

Sita
Ram Goel was a lifelong critic of the RSS, but unlike Mukhia, he knew what he
was talking about. Already as a student, he remarked that only mediocre fellow-students
were going to shakhas whereas the brighter ones were concentrating on other
pursuits or were seduced by Communism. Anyone who has read some of his work
(but that is where the problem for Mukhia arises) has seen for himself that its
message is quite different from the RSS line.

Mukhia
continues: “In the shakhas, they do tell you that Aurangzeb demolished temples
and erected mosques in lieu of them (which he did at Mathura and Varanasi), but
they never tell you that he was also giving monetary and land grants to other
Hindu temples, including some in Varanasi itself, the original document for
which is on display at the Bharat Kala Bhavan on BHU campus. Historians KK
Datta and Jnana Prakash have also published numerous documents of Aurangzeb
giving such grants to temples, maths and other Hindu institutions, and
many more remain unpublished. Naturally ‘historians’ like Goel and Elst
wouldn't know of them, nor would care to know.”

It
is not only in the shakhas that they tell you this. Aurangzeb himself gave
orders for a general destruction of temples and literally demolished thousands
of them. Many other Muslim rulers acted likewise. No amount of special pleading
by the eminent historians can change Islam’s record in this regard. It is
possible that earlier, Aurangzeb gave some grants to Hindu institutions, as had
been the Moghul dynasty’s policy since Akbar. We should of course not take
Mukhia’s word for it (the eminent historians have a well-established reputation
for mendaciousness), and “numerous” is certainly an exaggeration, but it
remains possible. This only shows the inertia of changing a policy, as well as
Aurangzeb’s increase in devotion to Islam, from a compromise-prone successor of
Akbar to a zealous activist for Islam, which does not tolerate idolatry.

One
issue where the much-maligned RSS is clearly wrong in its assessment of
Aurangzeb, is its condemnation of him as a fanatic person. The said grants to
temples, if true, may further prove a point that I have had to make repeatedly:
it is not true that Aurangzeb was a cruel character, he was not more so than
his less notorious predecessors. If he was cruel and fatatic, it was because he
started taking the core doctrine of Islam to his heart. He was a pious person,
more than is good for a ruler, so he became increasingly averse to the
religious compromise on which his great-grandfather Akbar had built the Moghul
empire. So at some point in his advancing years, not his personal predilection
but his growing commitment to Islam took over. That is when he ordered all
Pagan temples destroyed: when the Moghul empire became truly Islamic at last.
But the RSS is fearful to say this, so it tells itself and its listeners that
Islam is okay but that Aurangzeb “misunderstood” his religion due to his cruel
and fanatic personality.

The professor has some advice for my friend: “If
you really want to study history look at the works of professional historians
-- Tara Chand, RP Tripathi, Mohd. Habib, ABM Habibullah, Satish Chandra, Irfan
Habib, RM Eaton, Cynthia Talbot and many other stalwarts who gave their life
time to studying medieval history from the original Persian sources, not from
third rate and motivated translations like History
of India as Told by its Own Historians. Motivated? Sir Henry Elliott, who
compiled this 8-volume series, wrote in his Preface: The series is being
compiled ‘to let the bombastic babus of India know how terrible Indians' life
was until the British came to their rescue’!! So, Sir Elliott translated only
those passages from the Persian language chronicles of medieval India which
spoke of Muslims' atrocities on the Hindus!! He will tell you that Aurangzeb
demolished temples, but not that he also patronised them!!! Much like the RSS
does now and chaps like Goel and Elst follow in their footsteps.”

See,
the eminent historians are as good at the use of exclamation marks as your
average Hindutva internet warrior. And yes, Elliott was guilty of espousing the
same theory which the eminent historians have been spreading, viz. that the
British took India from the Moghuls, omitting the successful Hindu effort to
liberate most of India from Muslim occupation and then succumbing to the
British. But that doesn’t make his translations wrong. He selected those parts
which would be most telling for the atrocities undergone by the Hindus under
Muslim rule so that they would appreciate British rule by contrast – and then
translated these faithfully. He reminded his Hindu readers that their “own
historians” (meaning India-based Muslim chroniclers) had reported these Islamic
atrocities. Anyway, I would like to see the secular improvement, e.g. how do
you translate the frequently-used Arabic verb q-t-l, Persian kushtan,
both meaning “kill”. There aren’t too many nuances to that, are there?

Elliott’s
translations were correct, but yes, they were selective. Secularists would have
preferred to plough through an 88-volume rather than an 8-volume translation.
But they are at liberty to go through all the untranslated parts and try to
find a refutation there of what was described so explicitly in the translated
parts. The Muslim chroniclers were in no mind to undo all the destruction they
had evoked, so in the less dramatic parts of their work, they explored more
leisurely subjects but refrained from trying their hand at what the secularists
would like to read there, viz. any refutation of the grim picture they had
first painted, and which Elliott and others have ably translated.

For
lack of facts, Prof. Mukhia likes to throw names around instead. But a real
historian remains unimpressed by this show of name-dropping. The fact that
Prof. Mukhia has many like-minded colleagues in academe while his opponents
have to remain on the outside is not the result of better competence among his
friends, but of a deliberate policy in university nominations. Any young
historian who lets on too early that he has pro-Hindu convictions, will see his
entry into academe barred. Word will spread around that this man is “dangerous
to India’s secular fabric” and he will be excluded. There have been some old
historians who entered the profession before their cards were on the table and who
only became forthright critics of Islam at the end of their careers, the likes
of Prof. Harsh Narain and Prof. K.S. Lal, both since long deceased. Today among
university historians, the school that sets the record on Islam straight is
simply non-existent.

Fortunately,
the political equation that makes the present secular-Islamic bias possible, is
bound to come to an end one day. The elderly Prof. Mukhia won’t live to see
that revolution anymore, but it is sure to happen. The truth which the eminent
historians have long suppressed, will shine in the open. On that day, I
wouldn’t liketo be called Harbans
Mukhia.

The professor concludes: “I know this would have no
effect on you. But just by chance if you can pick up enough courage to study
history on your own and not parrot the history taught in the shakhas. Best
wishes, Harbans Mukhia”

It seems Harbans Mukhia
mistook his correspondent for some fanatic Hindutvavadi, the kind who remains
impervious to facts. Not that I know many such cases, for even the most extreme
ones I’ve met remain true to a central fact that really occurred, viz. Islamic atrocities
against Hindus. Some of them have personally lived through the Islamic carnage
at the time of Partition or during the Bangladesh liberation war, massacres
which completely dwarfed all Indian religious riots put together (including the
largest of them all, the killing of three thousand Sikhs by Congress
secularists in 1984). But this correspondent is a successful cyberprofessional
in Silicon Valley, who has made a more sophisticated study of just what it was
that Islam wrought in India.

The greatest insult which the
eminent historians could fling at Sita Ram Goel or myself is that we are
“parroting history taught in the shakhas”. First off, I don’t even know what
history they teach there. I have visited a few shakhas and can’t remember any
history being taught there. I speculate it is streamlined to fit the Hindu and
nationalist narrative, or at least that Mukhia wants to convey that impression.
So be it, but historians have other sources for their history-writing and are
not parrots of a party or movement. The main exception are the Indian secularists,
whose conclusions are invariably those desired and taught by the Nehruvian
rulers.

A second mail by the professor
starts out by ridiculing the RSS concept of history: “First, the RSS rant
started in the 1960s with the figure of 300 temples destroyed by the Muslim
rulers; then in the 70s another 0 was added. Yet another got added in the 80s.
But by the 90s the Sangh Parivar ran out of 0s, so they adopted another arithmetical
formula of multiplying by 2 and the figure now stood at a respectable 60,000.”

This claim may be true or not, but I
am not privy to RSS historiography. As a matter of fact, 60,000 may just happen
to be a good number, for the documented cases of temple destruction (and they
already run into the thousands) are necessarily only a fraction of the more
everyday cases, which must have been even more numerous. But we as historians
can only deal with documented cases, especially since these are difficult enough.
Indeed, of the ca. 2,000 cases listed by Sita Ram Goel, and more than 20 years
after having been out in the open, not one has been refuted by Prof. Mukhia and
his school.

So, like most secularists, he goes hiding behind an
American self-described Marxist, Prof. Richard Eaton: “RM Eaton, who would
necessarily be suspect in your eyes because he is a an American historian,
examined the number of temples destroyed in the whole expanse of medieval India
from 1200 to 1760 and came to the figure of 80. He has located the exact source
of information or each demolition and put all the information in a tabular
form. His brilliant article is called ‘Temple Desecration in Medieval India'.
By the way, Eaton is aware of the figure of 60,000 handed out to credulous people
like Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst and yourself.”

In several respects, Eaton’s count is incomplete.
Muslims destroyed Hindu temples before 1200 and after 1760 too, witness the
near-absence of the once-numerous Hindu temples in Pakistan, witness the
regular occurrence of temple destruction in Bangla Desh. It is also seriously
false that for this period, Eaton’s count is complete. How could it be?
Off-hand, Venkat could name a few cases from his own Tamil village, which was
only briefly touched by the Islamic invasions but nonetheless already lost
several temples, and they don’t figure in Eaton’s list. Archeologists regularly
find remains of destroyed temples, often underneath mosques, which do not and
cannot figure in Eaton’s list. Finally, one item on Eaton’s list doesn’t mean
one temple destroyed. The thousand temples destroyed in Varanasi during
Mohammed Ghori’s advances ca. 1194 form only one item on his list. What Mukhia
calls “eighty” is in fact thousands of temple demolitions. So in spite of his
Islam-friendly intentions, Eaton has only proven what Hindus have been saying
all along: Islam has destroyed thousands of temples.

I had in fact answered
Eaton’s list and explanation when they were published: “Vandalism sanctified by
scripture”, Outlook India, 31 Aug.
2001 ( http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?213030). Needless to say, my arguments have never been
refuted by anyone. Secular historians are so sure about controlling the
information flow through education and the media that they don’t bother to
interfere when their falsehoods are exposed. In the article, I also mention
Eaton’s sidekick Yoginder Sikand, then a furious Hindu-hater and secularist
journalist. But in the meantime, he has recanted and exposed the whole self-serving
buffoonery that does by the name secularism: “Why I Gave Up On 'Social Activism'”, Countercurrents.org, 19 April,
2012 (http://www.countercurrents.org/sikand190412.htm).

Prof. Mukhia goes on: “Incidentally, Hindu temples
were also demolished by Hindu rulers long before Muslims came to India. King
Harsha of Kashmir had appointed an officer, devopatananayaka (officerin-charge of uprooting of gods) as reported by Kalhana's Rajatarangini and
mosques were also destroyed by the Hindu rulers in medieval India. Details of
it can be found in my book, The Mughals of India. Incidentally, I have
never been funded by any US agency, University or institution and all my
education has been in India, and all schooling in Hindi medium. This is just to
guard you against the stupidity of levying charges such as you have done
against the most outstanding Indian historian of our time, Romila Thapar.”

As for Harsha, chronicler Kalhana says: “Prompted by
the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk.” It is simply not true that
his case exemplifies a Hindu type of iconoclasm. On the contrary, he merely
shows the influence of Islamic iconoclasm. Half-literate secularists keep on
repeating this story a decade after it has been refuted in my paper “Harsha of
Kashmir, a Hindu iconoclast?”, ch.4 of my book Ayodhya: the Case against the Temple (Delhi 2002; http://www.scribd.com/doc/10022510/Ayodhya-3-Books-by-Koenraad-Elst).It should be granted to Prof.
Harbans Mukhia, as to his colleague Prof. Irfan Habib, that they have
faithfully followed the old Nehruvian line of distrusting the “foreign hand”,
particularly the Americans. This is very unlike their colleague Prof. Romila
Thapar, who has been lavishly sponsored in Washington DC. And among their
generation, this was still exceptional. Indian secularists were admired from
afar, followed by the leading American scholars of India, like Prof. Paul Brass
or Prof. Robert Frykenberg, but keeping their distance because of the reigning
anti-Americanism. Now however, Indian academics of the right persuasion are
openly courted and hosted by American colleagues.

Returning to
the subject-matter, the professor asks: “But the question is more complex: how
is it that Aurangzeb, an orthodox Muslim on RSS account, waited for 21 years
after coming to the throne to reimpose the jazia? You remember the date
of its abolition by Akbar but not one of its reimposition which is 1679. How
did he keep his religious zeal in check for 21 long years when he was the
undisputed sovereign of India? And why was he giving grants to temples while he
was keen on demolishing it? The questions is WHY?”

“The answer is that huge and complex empires are not
governed by religious zeal of its rulers but by an enormously complex
interaction of political, administrative, cultural, social and religious
considerations. Remember Rajiv Gandhi passing a Bill in Parliament after the
Shah Bano judgment of the Supreme Court and getting the doors to the Ram
Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid disputed site opened almost simultaneously? Was he
being a zealous Muslim or a zealous Hindu or just a clever political
manipulator?”

Strictly speaking, not the Government but the Court
opened the locks of the Ayodhya building. But it stands to reason that the two
played together, and that the Court executed the policy desired by the
Government. At any rate, yes, Rajiv Gandhi was a clever manipulator, zealous
only in furthering his personal power and wealth. He intended to solve the
communal situation bloodlessly by handing the Hindus full control of Ayodhya
(including the right to rebuild a temple instead of the Babri Masjid) and
giving the Muslims other goodies, such as a Sharia-inspired change in the
lawon Muslim divorce or the ban on
Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses.
This not-so-principled but very practical policy, typical of the “Congress
culture”, would have succeeded but for the intervention of the eminent
historians and like-minded intellectuals: they raised the stakes on Ayodhya and
the Babri Masjid (“the bulwark of India’s secular polity”, etc.) so much that
the Government could no longer pursue its pragmatic give-and-take plan. The
result was endless religious riots, the surreptitious demolition, and more
riots culminating in the Muslim bomb attacks on Mumbai of 12 March 1993, which
pioneered a new Muslim tactic repeated in many other bomb attacks including
those on the US of 11 September 2001. The eminent historians have blod on their
hands.

It is also true that the Moghul empire was based on a
religious compromise, that Aurangzeb’s conversion to a more principled Islamic
policy jeopardized this compromise, and thereby endangered the empire itself.
At the end of his life, amid Hindu rebellions, Aurangzeb understood this well
enough. But he was too much of a pious Muslim to turn the clock back.

“As for Sita Ram Goel -- he used to rant regularly in
the Indian Express about the little
that RSS had taught him of history: Islam teaches you intolerance, every Muslim
ruler was inspired by Islam to destroy Hindu temples and Hindu society etc.
etc. and how Marxist historians cannot face up to the truth of all his rants.
You obviously read all this avidly. You obviously did not read 'Reflections of
the Past' in the same paper dated 30.4.1989 by a non-descript historian called
Harbans Mukhia. Since that date, Sita Ram Goel did not write a thing at least
in the Indian Express. Please check
it out; it should be available on the IE website. If not, you will find it in
the same non-descript historian's book Issues in Indian History, Politics
and Society, pp. 31-34. Please forgive me for advertising my own writings;
I avoided reference to myself in my earlier response, but since you were out to
challenge us secular historians, I felt compelled to reverse my earlier
decision. In any case you wouldn't have heard of many historians anyway; the
RSS never lets you know that they exist.”

Well, I didn’t know about this episode. 1989 is the
year when I first met Sita Ram Goel, at the end of the year. Arun Shourie was
then the editor of Indian Express,
and in that capacity, he published a number of articles that went against the
secularist opinion. In his books on religion and communalism, he made use of
insight he had learned from Goel. It is very much news to me, and does indeed
sound highly unlikely, that Shourie would have censored Goel. And it sounds
completely ridiculous to assume that Goel laid his pen aside because of what an
eminent historian wrote. For the next 14 years, Goel keept on writing
forcefully against all anti-Hindu forces including those represented by Mukhia.

As a parting-shot, the eminent historian informs us a
bit more about his locus standi
regarding translations: “By the way, the translations of the medieval Indian
Persian texts are quite often atrocious. I happen to know because my doctorate
at Delhi University back in 1969 was an evaluation of these texts. It is called
Historians and Historiography During the Reign of Akbar.”

As already said, “killing”
is something that happened frequently when Muslims encountered Hindus, and the
Muslim chroniclers thus had to describe this process quite often. Harbans
Mukhia has not convinced us that under the hands of the translators, “killing”
only got mentioned as a mistranslation of, say, “tolerating”. Maybe the more
abstruse elements in the narrative were subject to mistranslation, but the
relation between Hindus and Muslims was pretty straightforward and hard to
mistake for friendship.

The august professor bids us goodbye: “Voila, this is
my last intervention in this so-called debate. I have better things to do than
rectifying the RSS version of history. Best wishes, Harbans Mukhia”. Amen to
that.

While we were working on the argumentation
against the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), an improper and utterly false argument
against the presumed association of the rivaling Out-of-India Theory (OIT) with
Nazi Germany was being prepared in high places. This becomes clear from a
refutation of the latter in a paper published by the International Journal of Hindu Studies (no.16 = 2012, p.189-252),
and written by the German scholar Reinhold Grünendahl (Göttingen): “History in
the making: on Sheldon Pollock’s ‘NS Indology’ and Vishwa Adluri’s ‘Pride and
prejudice’”.

The homeland debate

Ultimately, a question of ancient history, such
as the location of the homeland of the Indo-European language family inside or
outside of India, will not be decided by its real or putative association with
political tendencies in the modern age. Thus, when Hindus are writing for the
umpteenth time that the AIT stems from colonialism and racism, they may be
wrong or they may be right, but at any rate they are wasting their breath.
Historians know that even a theory generateHistory plays out in a time when
other concerns were at stake than in the presentd by the wrong motives may
prove to be right, and even a point of view stemming from noble political
positions may be wrong. We all would like to domesticate history into political
usefulness for today, but have to acknowledge that it doesn’t work that way.

All the same, the AIT school do occasionally
try to blacken the Hindu nationalist movement’s newfound enthusiasm for the OIT
with a wrong political association, viz. by fitting it into their
well-established narrative that somehow this is a “fascist” movement. Thus, in
a newspaper column, Robert Zydenbos (“An obscurantist argument”, Indian Express, 12-12-1993) tried to
associate Navaratna Rajaram’s arguments for the OIT with Adolf Hitler’s
National-Socialism. More crassly, Yoginder Sikand (“Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics,
30-10-1993) likewise tried to link the OIT with Nazi Germany, playing on their
common concern for (but diametrically opposite interpretation of) the term Arya.

Of course, nobody who follows the debate,
closely or even from afar, can be taken in by this. Very obviously, the Nazis
themselves never believed in the OIT but were more ardent than most in
espousing the AIT. Practically all Westerners at the time, and many Indians as
well (including the Hindu nationalist leader of Congress, Balagangadhara Tilak,
and the ideologue of the Hindutva
movement, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar), took the AIT for granted. The Nazis had an
extra reason for putting their faith in it, viz. that the AIT served as the
perfect illustration to the Nazi worldview. The Aryan immigrants had
demonstrated their superiority, they had sought to protect it by instituting a
colour-based (to the Nazis: race-based) caste system, and they had lost part of
their European quality by succumbing to race-mixing nonetheless. So, if anyone
should be likened to Hitler, it is the AIT advocates themselves, including
Zydenbos and Sikand. The OIT school rarely misses a chance to highlight this
political identification of the AIT: with British imperialism as well as with
European racism epitomized by the Nazis.

We may assume that Zydenbos was a newcomer to
this debate, that he objected to the OIT in good faith and that he hadn’t
informed himself of the Nazi view on the homeland question. But two decades
down the line, the AIT belief has definitely lost its innocence. And already
back then, a specialist like Columbia professor Sheldon Pollock published a
paper titled: “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and power beyond the Raj”
(in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds.: Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia,
UPenn Press 1993, p.76-133), which includes a chapter titled “Ex Oriente Nox:
Indology in the Total State” (p.86-96). He and his acolytes have since kept on
elaborating this thesis, viz. that Germany invested much in Indology and used
it in its project of self-definition as “Aryans” contrasting with the “Semites”.
A recent example of this polemic is Vishwa Adluri’s paper in Pollock’s defence,
“Pride and prejudice: Orientalism and German Indology” (International Journal of Hindu Studies, 15 (=2011), p.253-294).

While we, both in the OIT and AIT camp, were
concentrating on the scientific evidence pertaining to the homeland and to the
direction of the Indo-European expansion, someone somewhere was working on a
large-scale and truly daring attempt to finally link the OIT to the
National-Socialist regime. Nonetheless, a Hindu industrialist recently donated Pollock
a fabulous sum of money for his work on Sanskrit literature, trusting him more
with this heritage than other Indologists including the native scholars, both
traditional and university-trained, who are far better at home in Sanskrit and
financially far cheaper than an American academic. So, this highly reputed
Sanskrit specialist sharpened his long-standing hatred of the Hindu nationalist
movement into a paper alleging that Indology in general and the OIT in
particular was much beloved of the Nazi establishment.

Edward Said

In this paper, Pollock at first seeks to
supplement Edward Said’s unjustly famous thesis Orientalism (1978) with the German chapter which Said purposely
left out. If truthful, such a chapter would have refuted Said’s whole theory,
viz. that “Orientalism” was nothing but the intellectual chapter of the political-economic
colonial entreprise. The mainstay of “Orientalist” scholarship was Central
Europe, then thoroughly German-speaking at least at the intellectual level.
Prussia only had colonies at a late date and far from the lands that interested
the Orientalists, while the other countries involved, including the
Austro-Hungarian empire, had no colonies at all. In the colonial countries too,
many Orientalists were by no means part of the colonial entreprise (pace Said’s conspiracy theory), but in
the German-speaking world, there was not even a colonial entreprise to
integrate the Orientalist endeavour in; yet Orientalism flourished there like
nowhere else. Moreover, Orientalism took wing when the Austro-Hungarian
Empire’s Oriental neighbor, the Ottoman Empire, was by no means a colony but a
threat and an equal trading-partner.

Indeed,
even in its better-developed “British” part, Said’s theory was deeply flawed
from the beginning, and the numerous errors of detail as well as the general
error of his theory have ably been
pointed out by Robert Irwin (For Lust of
Knowing: the Orientalists and Their Enemies, Allan Lane, London 2006) and
Ibn Warraq (Defending the West. A
Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Prometheus, Amherst NY, 2007). A comprehensive work on
German-language Oriental scholarship has been produced by Suzanne Marchand (German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race and Scholarship, German
Historical Institute, Washington DC, and Cambridge University Press, 2009). With the benefit of hindsight, we
can now pass judgment on Said’s influential publication which has seriously
damaged the fair name of the academic discipline called “Orientalism”.

Academics who still rely on Said’s thesis,
actually rely on a profoundly mistaken and highly politicized piece of scholarship.
His thesis is a thin attempt at justification for anti-Westernism. Much as this
is in vogue among Hindus, they are only making fools of themselves by espousing
Said’s conspiracy theory. For everyone, it isacademically weak and factually full of mistakes, but for Muslims at
least, they would be supporting their own man. They would be cheering for a Dhimmi, someone upholding Islamic
causes, in that as well as in other books. In supporting Said, Pollock is true
to his own camp, i.e. the anti-Hindu coalition. But for Hindus, there is
nothing in it, they are cheering for someone serving a declared enemy.

What Nazi rule really meant for Orientalism

Grünendahl cites many examples where Pollock and his defender
Adluri manipulate quotations to make past authors witnesses for their
accusations. I vaguely knew that Pollock was wrong in associating the OIT with
National-Socialism, but not that he was so spectacularly wrong. His thesis is
first of all that India was a central concern for the Nazis. This is put
forward most emphatically (but only with bluff) by Pollock and, on his
authority, generally taken for granted. Adluri elaborates that Germany was very
worried about building its “identity” as contrasting with the Semitic heritage
and the Semitic people in their midst, and used India for that purpose.

But Grünendahl shows from old and
neutral sources that the Indology departments received no special attention,
that they were small compared to Ancient Near-Eastern Studies, Sinology etc.,
and that the Nazi period showed no special interest in Orientalism in general
or Indology in particular. If anything, they suffered in their orientation on
India from the reigning emphasis on “Indo-Germanic studies”.

Marchand notes that the number of
German Oriental scholars as a whole fell from 360 in 1931 to 180 in 1940.
[2009:488] What connection she cites between Indology and the Nazis [2009:499]
is wholly based on Pollock, who estimates that one-third of the (only!) ca.
twenty-five Indology professors in the Third Reich were active in the
National-Socialist party or in the SS. This is the only time she cites him in
her 526-page book. (She also naïvely gives credence to other anti-Hindu
scholars such as Reza Pirbhai, p.311.) According to her: “Worst of all among
the Indologist collaborators was Walter Wüst, the Vedic specialist at the
University of Munich who became the director of the SS Ahnenerbe.” [p.499] But
Wüst is not known to have championed the OIT, on the contrary. The Nazi
regime’s favourite historian H.K.F. Günther believed the homeland lay in
Southeastern Europe. This was the reigning opinion in Europe, challenged only
by some Nazis who insisted on Germany or Scandinavia as the homeland. All of
them agreed that the Indo-European language family had only reached India
through an Aryan invasion.

Let us add that Marchand agrees to
include among the Nazi Indologists Paul Thieme, the revered teacher of Michael Witzel;
and he was, like his more militant pupil, a believer in the AIT. According to
Marchand, one of the Nazi concerns in Oriental scholarship was “the refutation
of the Jewish origins of monotheism” (p.489) namely in Mazdeism. The picture of
religion in National-Socialism was complex and diverse, but belief in the
superiority of monotheism was unchallenged. Like racism, it was then part of
the general consensus.

She also notes that: “Among the
Islamicists, there were also numerous collaborators (…)things looked rather promising for this
bunchin the period 1936-39” when the
Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels and Baldur von Schirach toured the Middle East,
and the Islamologists were used to liaise with Muslim leaders like the
Jerusalem Mufti, so that they “successfully disseminated Nazi ideas throughout
the Middle East”. [2009:490] Wouldn’t that be a good topic for Orientalist
scholars: Islamic-Nazi similarities as the reason for Nazi-Muslim friendships?

The Nazi concern
for “Aryans” speaking “Indo-Germanic” (innocently so named after its two
extremes: Indo-Aryan in Bengal and Germanic in Iceland) or Indo-European, now
and originally conceived as a language family but then also conceived as a
racial unit, couldn’t seriously be bothered with India. Their main concern was with the North, so
Grünendahl argues:

“The fundamental flaw of Pollock’s narrative is
that it hinges entirely on the exact reverse of the ‘Nordic’ notion. This
reversal, which provides the basis for the ‘founding myth’ of the entire
discourse machinery he set in motion, is enshrined in the grotesque proposition
that ‘the Germans… continued, however subliminally, to hold the
nineteenth-century conviction that the origin of European civilization was to
be found in India(or at least that
India constituted a genetically related sibling)’ (1993:77) Even to the
Romantic period [end of 18th, early 19th century, when
this notion was upheld by Johann Herder], this assertion only holds with
considerable qualifications (…) To make it the basis for theorizing any aspect
of the NS period is rendered absurd by the above-mentioned texts alone”. [p.199]

Hitler on the Hindus

Reference is to texts revealing Hitler’s
position on the Hindus. In 1920 already, he laid his cards on the table, and
would never waver from this position, not in Mein Kampf, which disparages Hindus as also German neo-Pagans, not
in his speeches nor in his wartime table talks. There he had evolved to mocking
religion in general and his native Catholicism specifically, though he
appreciated its organization and mass psychology and its anti-caste way of
recruiting its priests from the people rather than from a separate priestly
caste (yes, Hitler was also a comrade-at-arms of Pollock in their common
anti-Brahminism). He only knew of the Hindus through the lens of the AIT:

“While Hitler does refer to ‘the Hindus’, he
does so not with the intent to employ them as distant relatives in the
‘creation of Indo-German as counteridentity’ (Pollock 1993:83), but merely as
an illustration of ‘racial decline’ (Rassensenkung)
due to the destruction of ‘national purity’ (nationale Reinheit.)” (p.218, with reference to Adolf Hitler 1980
(1920): “Warum sind wir Antisemiten?” in Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, eds: Hitlers sämtliche Aufzeichnungen,
1905-1924, p.184-204: specifically p.195-196)

So, Hitler’s rare utterance on the Hindus was a
racial interpretation of the AIT. These are his own words
(1980/1920:195): “Wir wissen, dass die
Hindu in Indien ein Volk sind, gemischt aus den hochstehenden arischen Einwanderern
und der dunkelschwarzen Urbevölkerung, und dass dieses Volk heute die folgen
trägt; denn es ist auch das Sklavenvolk einer Rasse, die uns in vielen Punkten
nahezu als zweite Judenheit erscheinen darf.”(“We know that the Hindus in India are a people mixed
from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and
that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave
people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry.”)

For Grünendahl, this is merely an example of how the primary sources of German
history contradict the free-for-all that amateur historians make of it, in this
case the manipulated narrative by Sheldon Pollock. He sounds like defending
Germany’s true history against American (and then, by imitation, Indian)
distortions. Probably he doesn’t realize that this distortion, about the
presumed Nazi love for the OIT, constitutes Pollock’s ultimate motive. We don’t
want to pretend to read inside a man’s skull, so we will not speak out on his
intimate motives. But the objective finality of his thesis is at any rate to
blacken the OIT by associating it with National-Socialism. Reality, however, is
just the opposite: more even than other Europeans, the Nazis espoused and
upheld the AIT. Hitler-Pollock, same struggle!

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

On 14 November 2012, Prof. Deepak Sarma posted an article on Huffington
Post, titled “White
Hindu converts: mimicry or mockery?” In that blog, he defines
Hindus in America as an ethnic group animated by a memory of the colonized condition.
It should, he argues, mistrust attempts by white Americans to convert to their
religion. These whites only mimic “their imaginary (and often Orientalist)
archetypal ‘Hindu’ in order to reverse-assimilate, to deny their colonial
histories, to (futilely) color their lives, and, paradoxically, to be
marginalized”.

Before we can begin discussing this thesis, we note that one word
already stands out: “Orientalist”. Indeed, Sarma is one of those Hindus who
take Edward Said’s theory of “Orientalism” seriously, even to the point of
making their own whole work a footnote to Said’s magnum opus. But Said’s influential book has been refuted as both
riddled with factual errors and being in essence a grand conspiracy theory. It
is plainly shameful for an academic to be seen in Said’s company and to use the
neutral term “Orientalism” in Said’s pejorative sense. But for a Muslim, at
least, it is a form of championing his own cause: he merely quotes a Dhimmi (a self-humiliating “tolerated”
non-Muslim, for that is what the Palestinian Christian Said was), a defender of
Islamic interests, who found a new way of overruling all the scientific research
that Western scholars (a.k.a. Orientalists) had done on Islam. But for a Hindu,
it is sheer buffoonery to treat Said as a scholarly authority. It seems that
Sarma never grew up to doubt the pious lies he was taught in school.

Colonialism

Now, to come to Sarma’s own thesis: we find that he does not mention the
contents of Hindu tradition, eventhough therein lies the only interest that
Hinduism has for its converts. Most white converts by far don’t care to join
Hindu society as such, and know little about mundane Hindu reality. They only
know their guru, maybe his ashram in India, and some pretty ancient Hindu
scriptures. That is their limited view of Hinduism, and that is what some
convert to it. In this, most of them have no consciousness at all about
colonial history, known to our generation only through the history books. It is
simply not true that they do it because they want to “identify with the
subaltern group and can transform from the oppressor to the oppressed, from the
colonizer to the colonized”. Oppression is not what people think about when
they think of India, which has been independent for as long as 95% of the
Indians can remember. Thus, if India suffers from widespread corruption, it was
not inflicted by or inherited from the British, but is the doing of its own
citizens, and everybody knows it. In his university’s ivory tower, Sarma may
obsess over long-gone colonialism, but most people don’t.

Moreover, while for British youngsters colonial India is a dim reality
they once heard of from their grandparents, for Americans it was never a
reality at all, unless you mean that they opposed it. Like the Indians, the
Americans saw themselves as having acquired their freedom from British
colonialism. It was American journalists who gave a global platform to Mahatma
Gandhi and cheered for his struggle against colonialism. I will not go into the
complex situation of the continental Europeans, who were no party to India’s
colonization but took it for granted (and of whose countries some gave
independence to their colonies under American pressure), or to the Irish, who
took part in the British conquest of India all while their own homeland was in
a colonized condition for far longer than India. At any rate, it is bad history
to identify American whites with colonialism. It may have escaped the racially-obsessed
Prof. Sarma’s attention, but there were white anti-colonialists too.

Tribal
conversions

The professor is badly informed when he claims: “Surely such an imagined
transformation is only available to those who are privileged in the first
place.” Can only “privileged” whites make a conversion across Christian/Dharmic
boundaries? Not at all: a majority of Indian Christians consist of people from
an underprivileged Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe background. That is the
comparison which this subject calls for: if there are American “whites” (in
fact, blacks too) who convert to Hinduism, there are many more Hindus (or
whatever you want to call them; let us say “Indian religionists”) who have
converted to Christianity. And against the hurdles which Deepak Sarma wants to throw
in the way of Western would-be converts to Hinduism, brown converts are courted
by and welcomed with open arms into Christianity. In fact, he need not even go
back to his homeland to see this phenomenon: in America itself, many
second-generation Hindus are eagerly converted by Evangelical Christians. Some
of the most successful politicians of Indian descent are in this case.

Indeed, we see a strange alliance emerge. While American Christians have
no option but to tolerate the conversion of some of their members to Hinduism,
they do try to prevent this development. Indeed, after the seeming elopement of
the children of Christian parents with Hindu gurus (or with Japanese Zen
Buddhism, or with secular Leftism) in the 60s and 70s, the American Churches
devised strategies to keep or to win back their flock, strategies which have
been copied in other Christian countries. Now, they get the objective support
of a born Brahmin who tries to limit entry to Hinduism to native Hindus, or at
least to non-white people.

This is in fact a new form of an old phenomenon: Brahmins trying to
limit the entry to Hinduism. A number of times, Hindu rulers have tried to
reconvert populations that had gone over to Islam under duress or social
pressure, but Brahmins prevented them. I am not in favour of the game of
blaming the Brahmin caste, but here they really have committed an error which
Deepak Sarma is now repeating.

Expansive
Hinduism

Hinduism, as Sarma’s aged colleague Prof. Arvind Sharma has shown, was a
missionary religion for very long. Indeed, this is how Vedic tradition spread
from the Northwest of the Subcontinent: tribes in South and East India
collectively joined, embraced the Hindu epics, employed Brahmin priests whom
they welcomed and allowed to settle, and generally added Hindu culture to their
own tribal culture, which largely survived in Hindu form.A difference with Christianity was that it
did not require its newcomers to abjure any past religion. Most of the tribe’s
ancestral tradition persisted under the aegis of Hinduism.

Another difference was that it was mostly tribes as a whole that joined
Hinduism, while Christianity converted individuals. Sometimes these were
followed by their families or communities, sometimes not. Sometimes this
conversion split communities down the middle and pitted converts against
non-converts – the very reason Mahatma Gandhi and many other Hindus have given
to oppose conversions. Differences of “identity” were taken for granted, tribal
life in the forests of Andhra was very different from the Vedic cattle-raisers’
life on the plains of Haryana or the urban life in the West-Panjabi town of
Harappa; but Hinduism took all those differences along in its capacious bosom,
just as it can give a place to white citizens of Los Angeles along with
sun-tanned whites of Jammu or the dark brown natives of Chennai.

A third difference is that ancestral religions were followed as a matter
of tradition, because people had learned it from their parents and the elders
of the tribe, whereas many (though not all) conversions to Christianity took
place because the converts were convinced of the truth of their newfound belief
system. In the case of Indian tribes adopting Vedicism/Brahminism, this same
consideration may have played a role for a certain elite though not for the
masses, but in the case of Christianity it is really typical. It is ironic that
a religion of which the core doctrines (e.g. mortality as a consequence of
primeval sin; Jesus as son of God; his resurrection; its power to free man from
sin and from mortality) are demonstrably untrue, put such an emphasis on its
truth claim. This may be explained by the cultural milieu in which it came into
being, the Hellenistic emphasis on truth claims, but that circumstance does not
yet make the beliefs true. However, many people were convinced they were, and
therefore converted.

Most Western converts to Hinduism follow the Christian model of
conversion at least in this second and third respects. They convert as
individuals, not collectively (though when you look at life in Ashrams, they
end up intermarrying far more with each other than with native Hindus, thus
forming a separate caste of Western Hindus); and they become Hindu because they
believe the core doctrines of Hinduism are true. Prof. Sarma’s considerations
of colonialism, identity or privilege don’t figure in this process at all.

Campus dogmas

American universities are deeply sick with a hyperfocus on sociological
issues, most of all on “identity”. Last month I attended the annual conference
of the American Academy of Religion, a forum which ought to focus on higher
issues transcending the mundane problems of communal “identity”. But instead,
the majority of papers dealt, explicitly or implicitly, with these question of
identity. At least I met one (non-academic) Hindu scholar who soberly remarked
that identity is just there, that it is a coincidental starting-point from
which you embark on more engaging projects such as religion. But in Deepak
Sarma we have an academic who, instead of playing the game while at work but
laughing at it when at home, takes the new dogma seriously. He really believes
in the salvific power of “identity”. He really thinks of himself as
“colonized”, though he has never lived through the colonial period in his
homeland, nor in America. By contrast, the question of the truth of Hinduism
does not enter his mind (or at least his article) at all, even when it is
all-important to the people he lambasts, the white converts.

Sarma does have a point where he observes that some Western converts “claim
to be more ‘authentic’ than Diaspora Hindus”. Yes, and this is even more
remarkable when you realize that most converts don’t know of the many
inter-Hindu discussions where Hindus complain about their (or each other’s)
decadence. Hindu society in India and even more in America does have its
problems, and converts are free from that particular history. Indeed, they
often totally ignorant of it. Thus, many of them are totally innocent of how
Hinduism in its homeland is besieged by certain movements, including the
Hindu-born secularists, and how the Hindus they meet are to various extents
trying to live up to the standards set by their enemies (e.g. those Hindus who
try to prove to the Christian missionaries, but firstly to each other, that
Hinduism is monotheistic). They only know the ideal Hinduism laid down in
ancient books such as the Upanishads or the Yoga Sutra, and judge the native
Hindus they meet by this yardstick.

They should not do this, they should keep in mind a fundamental humility
and willingness to learn. Whatever the situation of these diasporic Hindus, and
whatever the compromises with modern society they have had to make, both in
their homeland and in their country of settlement, they have lived the really
existing Hinduism all their lives, and converts could learn a few things from
them. But the Western converts’ attitude is understandable (not justifiable)
when you compare it with the Western Communists of yore who met people from the
countries where the really existing Communism was in power: they were
disappointed at the corruption in the Soviet Union, the conformism of the Chinese,
or the backwardness of North Korea. This reality fell short of the Communism of
their dreams, or rather, the Communism of the textbooks. They wanted the
Communism as it should have been, and now they want the Hinduism of the
textbooks, as it should have been. Of course most real Hindus don’t live up to
the standards of a Yajnavalkya or a Patanjali; but converts of whatever colour
are inspired by Yajnavalkya or Patanjali and want to be like them, not like
Deepak Sarma.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.